Coupeville Sports

    The “Insolent Blogger vs. Canadian Corporate Lackies” stare-down enters year two. Slap fight in three, two, one…

So, this is where I’m supposed to get profound.

As we stand two days from the one-year anniversary of coupevillesports.com (and they said I’d give up after six months…), I’m supposed to talk about how this blog pulled me back from a dark period in my life.

How it revived my interest in journalism after Canadian Corporate Loonies from Moosejaw crapped all over three years worth of my bylined stories in The Whidbey Examiner, erasing them with a single keystroke.

After a carpetbagger owner sold out (in more ways than one) and fled town, her pockets stuffed with money made partially off of the sweat and skills of those dumb enough to buy her “we’re fighting the man” spiel.

After the last independent paper on Whidbey Island was stabbed in the back and left to bleed out in the streets.

See, up until that point, I really didn’t care all that much.

You shouldn’t have made it personal. Because now it most certainly is just that.

I try and walk a fine line and frequently fail.

I like many of the men and women who work for the Evil Empire. I owe the start of my journalism “career” to one or two of them.

But when you cash the check from Canada, you make your decision. You put on the Stormtrooper armor, you are the bad guys.

Call it self righteousness. Call it me being an ass. Pick your favorite.

The reality is, this blog is kickin’ the big, fat, way overpaid butts of the Whidbey News-Times, Examiner and South Whidbey Record.

I have produced more than 1,200 articles in the first year and run billions of photos. I have taken a chunk of your audience away, a younger generation that will not return.

I am faster. I know more people. I consistently break more news than you do. I write about the athletes you have never heard of, the athletes you ignore, the athletes you marginalize.

I am beating you and will continue to do so.

And you know why? Because I still believe in the pipe dream of “independent journalism.”

I abuse my typing fingers in the dish pit — they bear slashes and cuts, grooves washed out by the salty waters of twice-daily swims in Penn Cove — and I wake up in the middle of many a night with my hands feeling like they’re broken.

Some days there is a deep buzz in my fingers, a stiffness put there by a job that wasn’t fun at 18 and is a real pain at 42.

That buzz in my fingers drives me, however. It gives me that edge of crankiness that makes me write at 3 AM, when you’re sleeping on beds filled with downy-soft imported feathers bought on your cushy Canuck pensions.

Fear the man with the buzz in his fingers.

Year one was showing you how just how you would lose this battle. Year two is going to get a whole lot more painful.